Donald Trump’s Election Night Party: What His Supporters Knew That No One Else Did

At first, they were cautiously optimistic—but didn’t want to get ahead of themselves.

At Donald Trump’s official election-night headquarters, at a Hilton in Midtown Manhattan, the Trump supporters who arrived early said they were “confident” in a Trump victory. They wore suits and American flag bow ties, body-con dresses and four-inch stilettos, and, of course, a sea of red Make America Great Again hats. Contestants from The Apprentice mingled with increasingly wasted college students. It was around 9 or so, and I still thought they were delusional, or lying.

Then, as the ubiquitous Fox screens in the ballroom called Ohio for their candidate, their hopefulness grew. Cheers went up in the crowd, as did chants of “USA! USA!” Fox made more projections for Trump, and said the candidate was ahead in Michigan and Wisconsin, two reliably Democratic strongholds.

The mood was changing in the modest Hilton ballroom, a venue chosen partially due to Trump’s superstitions of “jinxing” things and partly because, we can assume, the campaign didn’t want to suffer a loss with thousands of supporters in tow. People were lining up for drinks at the cash bar, even though it cost $11 for a Heineken. They were grinning, still not ready to celebrate yet, but getting more confident.

A Fox commentator cited the New York Times projection, which had Trump at a 91 percent chance of winning. I’d been busy talking to Trump supporters, including Robert Trump, Donald’s little brother, who called the night a “very interesting and historic moment for the family, and for America,” and hadn’t been paying much attention to Trump’s increasingly clear path to 270 electoral votes. “Is that true?” I asked, incredulous, looking at the reporters sitting around me in the press filing area, clacking away on their laptops. By the time I looked it up, the Times forecast was 93 percent for Trump.

When I went back to the ballroom, I ran into an acquaintance I’d worked alongside at the White House, who works for Breitbart News, the unabashedly pro-Trump website that has become a voice for the alt-right. Even he couldn’t believe what was happening. They’d just called Wisconsin, a state Hillary Clinton considered so safe she hadn’t visited since the primaries. “I’m in shock,” he told me. “Wisconsin?”

Many in the media—even Breitbart, whose former executive chairman, Steve Bannon, runs the Trump campaign—could barely process what was happening. Months of data showing Clinton ahead crumbled before our eyes. But Trump supporters could. I wandered around the party, interrupting supporters’ celebrations. “How do you think pollsters and so many in the media got this wrong?” I asked.

“They're biased. And most people get all mad at the media—the media don't realize they're biased,” Mac Love, a diehard Trump fan from Maryland, told me. “If you think one way, and that's how you look at everything...it's not even close to being fair.”

As Jim Rutenberg from The New York Timesput it: “The news media by and large missed what was happening all around it, and it was the story of a lifetime.”

How did we all fail so massively? It’s a question that pundits will no doubt parse over the next days, weeks, months, years. After the Wisconsin call, Mark Pawelec, a 21-year-old from New Jersey, took a stab at it. “I think that you really underestimated the kind of support that Trump had on a really visceral level, like, down with the roots of the American electorate,” he said, the “you” being me and the rest of my media cronies. “He really knew how to connect to the people. He knew what the people wanted.”

Earlier in the night, I’d talked to a slew of attendees about how they were feeling. Around 6:30, I ran into Omarosa Manigault, the infamous villain on the first season of The Apprentice who was, improbably, helping Trump rally African-American voters. “I can't get comfortable, because Florida's so close right now,” she told me. A few hours later, Fox called the state for Trump. A pair of twins, Alexandra and Juju Bernstein, who grew up with Trump’s youngest daughter, Tiffany, said they were “really excited” and “confident” the candidate would pull out a win. Jesse Blanco, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, Trump’s alma mater, was the only person I saw holding a “Hispanics for Trump” sign. He was thrilled to be voting for Trump for the first time. “I wanted my first vote to be meaningful,” he told me. “I felt like, in 2016, my vote was gonna be one that would be very consequential for years to come.” When I talked to him, around 7 P.M. or so, I didn’t know the half of it.

Once they called Florida and North Carolina, everything became a blur. There were screams, hugs, chants of “Lock her up!” as Fox showed the funereal Clinton headquarters just two miles away. As people across the country and the world struggled to make sense of the dawning reality, Trump supporters were vindicated. They’d known the score all along.